ICMI's Customer Management Insight - December 2007 - (Page 13) CONTACT CENTER SPOTLIGHT training draws to a close. “This method has proven to be successful,” Mendoza says, “as agents are productive within the first week of employment.” Continuous training is as essential as new-hire training at TransCore, with most agents receiving 20 to 25 hours of such instruction. A lot of that time is spent learning about and working with new products in a test environment a few months before each product launches. TransCore also occasionally taps outside training experts, enabling agents to attend both formal and informal training offered by such organizations as ICMI, the Help Desk Institute, Portland Community College, New Horizons and NW Support Professionals. The center’s focus on career development truly is employeecentric; supervisors work closely with each agent to create a development plan geared specifically toward the agent’s career objectives. Using formal skills assessments, supervisors help identify the gap between the agent’s current skill-set and where they need to be in order to achieve their stated goals. In addition to carving out fulfilling careers in the contact center, some agents move on to pursue careers in such departments as Customer Retention, Sales, IT, Quality Assurance and Product Development. GETTING PROACTIVE WITH CUSTOMER SATISFACTION Agents in action at TransCore’s Customer Support Center TransCore team lead Rocio Carter (left) collaborates with agents Dana Carter and Albert Payne over a business process. All this focus on agents doesn’t interfere with TransCore‘s view of the customer experience. The center — using a tool called Survey Solutions by Perseus — emails customer satisfaction surveys to cusicmi’s insight tomers immediately after their service request is closed (regardless of the channel used by the customer: phone, email or chat). Via this survey, customers are asked to rate various aspects of the caller experience, including time to live answer, time to resolve the issue, courtesy and knowledge of the agent and overall satisfaction. Whenever a customer indicates obvious dissatisfaction, the survey system notifies the center’s management team, and a supervisor contacts the customer by no later than 10 a.m. the next business day. “We have found that we have been able to turn what may have been a bad experience into a positive one, as customers are often surprised we read and responded to their comments,” says Mendoza. Fortunately, such calls to customers needn’t be made very often: 97 percent of TransCore customers rate their overall customer service experience as meeting or exceeding their expectations. Survey results are used for more than just identifying and saving frustrated customers; they are used to enhance agent performance and awareness of key customer issues, as well, thus ensuring that repeated negative experiences with TransCore are a rarity. “Agents receive feedback on both positive and negative survey results,“ Mendoza explains. “By sharing the customer perspective with the agent, we are able to enhance or improve the customer experience on future calls.“ • www.icmi.com | DECEMBER 2007 13 http://www.icmi.com
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